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That Time I Forgot To Tell You I’m Pregnant

June 23, 2015

Sooooo, this is happening:

Fifteen weeks along; finding out the sex next week! The baby is due December 16th.

I really didn’t mean to keep it off the blog for so long; I just…didn’t mention it. For whatever reason, I didn’t feel like making a “big announcement” post. For a while, of course, we wanted to keep it private to make sure that everything was going to be okay. And then we announced it on Facebook. And I posted this on Instagram:

…and I kept thinking, I should post something on the blog. I should post something on the blog. But then I just…didn’t.

A part of me just feels like this 2nd pregnancy will probably pass with a lot less fanfare. I had a really easy pregnancy with Lila, and I’m hoping for the same with baby number two. No sickness yet. Exhaustion in the first trimester (to be expected), but I’ve been feeling pretty energetic and active and…well, just normal in the second trimester. Still going to the gym and running on the treadmill, although outdoor runs have NO appeal to me at all—too hot out there, even early in the morning! I also seem to be experiencing less in terms of food cravings and aversions—I’ve had a bit of that, but not as strongly as I remember from the first pregnancy when I just wanted lemonade and hamburgers and (strangely) grilled cheeses with pickles ALL. THE. TIME.

So. Things are going well. Lila is excited, and asks me every day if I’ve “grown very big and round.” Not yet…but it’s coming.

To wrap up previous posts about fertility, for those of you who are interested, here’s how that played out. We had our third iui. It didn’t work. We went in and talked to my doctor about IVF, which I wasn’t interested in doing…I guess I just wanted to hear the information to confirm that it wasn’t what I wanted, haha. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: if we didn’t already have Lila, I think (I mean, I know) I probably would have felt very differently about ivf. However, since we already had one healthy child, I was much more inclined to just “get okay” with the idea of just having one child, rather than go the (expensive, invasive, not guaranteed) ivf route. Obviously every couple is different, but that’s just how I felt. So after the whole ivf discussion, I went out to our car and had a great, big cry.

Our doctor also told us at that same appointment that he could “super charge” my uterus (fun!!!) with fertility drugs and try more iui’s. Since I was ovulating on my own and everything seemed fine/normal, they hadn’t been pairing the iui’s with any fertility meds. Doing so, he said, would give me a better chance of getting pregnant. It would also give me a greater chance of getting pregnant with a litter multiples. I’m not sure our marriage would survive a TLC show, so I wasn’t excited about the “super-charged uterus” idea either.

At the end of the appointment, we discussed the fact that we couldn’t do anything this cycle anyway—we were going to be out of town for spring break. My doctor (who I really liked) said, “Look, just take a break. Don’t do anything this month. Take your time and think things over, and we’ll decide where to go from here after you get back.”

So that’s what we did. And of course, we got pregnant.

I have a lot of mixed feelings regarding our fertility treatment. I know a lot of doctors don’t tell their patients under the age of 35 to try fertility treatments until they’ve been trying for at least a year. We got pregnant in just under a year, so a part of me wonders if my doctor should have told us to just keep trying (especially since neither one of us had any apparent problems). I think sometimes it just takes a while, and it seemed like it was taking a lot longer to me because it happened so quickly the first time. It sure would have saved us a lot of money—those iui’s aren’t cheap. It’s a little frustrating to know that after all that, we ended up just getting pregnant on our own. And, the fertility treatment stuff was incredibly stressful—when each iui would fail, I would think, We are never going to get pregnant. Which seems dramatic, I know—but in my mind, I kept thinking, “If they’re literally taking the “specimen” and placing it next to a ready and waiting egg, and that’s not working…well, what will?!?”

On the other hand, at the point when my doctor sent us to the fertility center, I was feeling pretty frustrated. Going there, talking to my doctor, getting the iui’s—all of that made me feel like at least we were doing something—even if it wasn’t working. And I learned a lot about my body…cycles…all that fun stuff. I probably learned too much about that—if I never see another fucking ovulating predictor kit again in my life, it will be too soon.

Anyway. That’s the story. And for all those people who like to say “See?! I knew it would happen when you’d just relax and stop stressing about it!” Ummmm, no. I was definitely still stressed out during the time that we did conceive—probably the most stressed out I’ve been about anything in my life. The toll that “struggling” (and I do feel the need to put it in quotes, because I know a lot of couples take a lot more time than us) to get pregnant took on me, Ryan, and our marriage, was not small. So when people tell you to just relax and let it happen, you have my permission to tell them to fuck off.

So yeah…Christmas baby! Which means come January I’ll be trapped in a house with a three year-old and a newborn…but we’re not going to think about that now.

Congratulations again from me! This was a very interesting and informative post, and I’m sure it helps others who are having a tough time (and there seem to be many these days). Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. Love, Mom